In only the first few days of the Florida campaign, every aspect of the GOP contest has blown up on a grand scale: the price of competing, the nastiness of the attacks and the cost of a potential defeat for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich.

In the wake of Gingrich’s shocking shellacking of Romney in South Carolina, Floridians find themselves at ground zero of a political storm that is raining acid rhetoric and sending the candidates scrambling across the Sunshine State. Most of all, it’s pouring out a deluge of ads that will make the cacophony heard in the other early states seem like a lullaby.

Romney has led the way in the Florida spending race, pounding the airwaves with an unanswered, saturation-level offensive while other candidates were stuck meeting voters one by one in South Carolina. It’s a spare-no-expense media blitz that amounts to a test of whether Romney’s financial firepower can hold back the Gingrich surge — or whether his advantages on that front have been seriously overestimated.

The former Massachusetts governor’s efforts are still escalating: his campaign and the super PAC Restore Our Future bought more than $5 million in additional airtime Monday, putting their overall investment around the $13 million mark in Florida television and radio advertising, according to GOP media-buying sources. That spending included the first negative ads run directly against Gingrich by Romney’s campaign.

The comparatively under-funded Gingrich operation is starting to fight back, placing a $145,000 ad buy on Fox News and receiving some $354,000 in backup from the super PAC Winning Our Future. Those numbers could grow rapidly thanks to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s decision to direct a second $5 million donation to Winning Our Future.

Up to this point, though, Gingrich has only put trifling sums on the air in Florida, a state that covers 10 media markets, is far too vast for an Iowa-style retail campaign, and where poor strategic and spending choices by any of the Republican candidates could break his campaign.

The ferocious ad war now playing on Florida televisions, radios, computers and mobile devices is a very long way indeed from sedate town meetings in oh-so-earnest Manchester and Des Moines.

“Florida is Armageddon,” said Ken Goldstein, president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, emphasizing that the 2012 race has been magnified far beyond the dimensions of Iowa and New Hampshire. “It’s just a whole different ball game in terms of the scope of the campaign, the number of media markets, the size of media markets and the expense of the media markets.”

Former Florida Sen. George LeMieux, a Republican currently challenging Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson, defined the shift in these terms: “Instead of campaigning in one small state, Florida’s — in my mind — like campaigning in five states put together. Some of our counties have larger populations than some of the states that have already voted in this election.”

And if the proportions of the struggle have grown in Florida, so has the magnitude of the momentum swings between the candidates, said former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez.

“I’ve never seen one this volatile and I’ve been involved in a lot of them,” Martinez, who is neutral, said of the primary campaign. “Everybody’s got a small core [of support] and they move around based on events. You can’t have the swings that you’re seeing without that being the case, in my opinion.”

It’s the debates and the TV ads shaping the campaign, he added: “I haven’t seen that many yard signs.”

Yard signs are only one of the early-state staples that seem comparatively insignificant in Florida’s Category 5 primary campaign.

The state representative and city councilor endorsements, the diner drop-ins and church visits, the warm words from pastors and local organizers — they’re all still helpful for the candidates, but they shrink in relevance amid a torrent of paid and free media.

For the non-Romney candidates, the challenge isn’t finding a way to match the front-runner dollar for dollar, according to Florida campaign veterans. It’s putting enough money on the air to avoid drowning in Romney’s cash, making zero-sum choices about how much to invest in costly markets such as Miami, and how much time to spend in out-of-the-way areas like the Florida Panhandle. Then, they must earn enough positive television and newspaper coverage to make up the difference with the front-runner.

That’s a particularly high hurdle for Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, who lack Romney’s war chest and Gingrich’s momentum. Their task in Florida is less a question of victory than survival.

Romney, in contrast, must decide just how much more of his war chest to dump into a state where he’s already spent heavily, and where Gingrich’s post-South Carolina momentum threatens to devalue a financial and organizational investment that should have been overwhelming.

“I think the big question for everybody at this point, particularly for Gingrich, is can you afford to be up in Miami? I don’t think there’s any question he can afford to be up everywhere but Miami really easily,” said Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who was President Barack Obama’s 2008 Florida director. “If [Gingrich is] able to get a million and a half, 2 million bucks on TV, he can put enough down there with what he’s got elsewhere to be competitive.”

Thanks to the wall-to-wall state and national media attention to the campaign, Schale said: “Basically, you’re running ads between coverage of what you’re doing.”

A host of Florida politicos said that means the debates — which already had unprecedented influence in the smaller early states — have now taken on even more monumental importance, potentially diluting the value of paid commercials in the process.

“I think people are tuned out to the advertising and they’re much more focused on venues like the debate,” said Polk County GOP Chairman Jim Nelson, who hasn’t endorsed a candidate. “I truly think it’s anybody’s race and I think the debates will have a pretty dramatic impact on the turnout.”

To the extent that debates set the tone for the day-to-day Florida campaign, they’re also likely to push the race in a strongly negative, confrontational direction: Romney kicked off Monday night’s forum in Tampa by sniping at Gingrich as an “influence peddler,” criticizing his work for mortgage lender Freddie Mac. That’s a line of attack he’s taken up on the campaign trail, too.

In-state advisers to Romney and Gingrich concede that the campaign has already turned brutal. They predict it’s likely to get even more bruising for both candidates in the remaining week — not necessarily a welcome prospect for Republicans in a state the party must win next November.

But in the campaigns’ view, that roughness is just one more reflection of the fact that the center of the race isn’t in Dubuque anymore, and the stakes have become far too great for a polite, back-slapping, small-state campaign.

Former Orange County Mayor Rich Crotty, one of Gingrich’s Florida co-chairs, predicted the next week would be “about as harsh” as the 2012 primaries get.

“This is bare-fisted. This is gonna be a hard-hitting campaign,” he said. “I think there is a sense — particularly if the winner of South Carolina wins this — that a lot of the establishment elected officials and Republican leadership that got behind Romney early see this slipping away from them. That may explain part of the intensity.”

Even before Monday night’s debate, Romney’s campaign had launched a full-scale surrogate attack on Gingrich, deploying former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Florida House Speaker-designate Will Weatherford to assail Gingrich’s ethics.

That, Weatherford said, is because the prize of Florida is “worth fighting for” with whatever tactics are necessary.

“Unfortunately, some of it probably will be negative, but a lot of it is going to be on policy and on principle,” the Republican lawmaker said. “I think that Gov. Romney is going to have to show that he is capable of beating President Obama, number one, and that he is the conservative choice to lead this country.”

Weatherford acknowledged: “Speaker Gingrich is a formidable opponent. But I also think Mitt Romney has been to the dance before and this isn’t the first time he has come to Florida with a lot on the line.”